Each chapter is around ten thousand words in length and takes around two weeks to do. There is an ugly rough draft that I mostly ignore, so that two weeks is for rewriting, editing, tightening, etc. Compared to other writers, I am a slow author, but most of it is due to how I process things in my mind. A lot of people have various methods for writing, but the one I've found best is to simply write a thousand new words a day, Monday to Friday. Deadlines can make you move faster, and indeed, I can move faster. I can put out between three to five a day for a week, but what happens, after doing that for a few weeks, is that I burn out and I get up and walk away for a couple of weeks and do nothing. The net product is about the same, in word counts, but its not as productive as just a consistent work load, which is what I've found works best for me. Your mileage may differ, of course.

But, regardless. Down to four chapters. Beginning the siege now.

Here's something I did the other day. I'll edit it a bit more in a few days, so it may or may not look like this a week from now:

“Your skin burns, child.” The matron in the orphanage had drawn her from her friends five days after she had arrived. The large white woman had stopped the game she had been playing and led her into her office: a room surrounded by files and paper, a nest of information and junk. “I am not a woman who tolerates curses,” she said, “and I am watching you for such. I do not want to wake up one morning and find that your friends are dead in their bed, that the ward you sleep in has caught fire and you have turned all in there black and charred while you rest easy. I will not have a tragedy under my watch.”

She had a child's grasp on the language, yet her understanding of death was anything but. The matron's words frightened her, terrified her, made her think that she could be responsible for such an act.

“I will send you from this establishment before the week is over,” the woman continued. “I will send to Yeflam, where they can deal with your kind.”

The matron had died, had burned to death, before she could send Ayae away, and she had slipped through the administrative cracks, even as her mind had blamed herself, using the woman's words as condemnation.